connected

Recently I have been impressed by an aspect of shopping that I never noticed before. Disclaimer - I rarely shop, but I used to scrounge a lot around Christmas time for unique stocking stuffers and that takes time and a whole lot of energy. This year I was looking for one specific item for my sister and it required interacting with sales personnel. The gamut of sales personnel is a whole story in itself, but not my point right now!! I'm here with a positive note.

Every time I went beyond the neat straight lines of the inquiry, I got rewarded. I even had an extended conversation with a clerk at a most unlikely store about giving and receiving presents - it was astonishing! It was like there was the tiniest trickle of water flowing, and I just pushed aside one little stone and the trickle became a stream - full of sound and light and completely refreshing!

The other thing that jumped out at me, I spoke to other customers who were either wandering aimlessly in large department stores like I was, or looked to be in the know, and all four times that I ventured beyond my personal space I was again rewarded with humor, understanding, comradery! I just was reminded again how buttoned up we are for the most part. I understood completely how important openness was on a public desk at a library for 33 years. Now I think I have to convey the concept to wherever my steps take me in each day. 

I think the world hungers for connection.

o tannenbaum

Yesterday the Christmas tree went up in our household.

Each year, I glance at the work it entails and think, do I want to do it? And each year - so far - I remember the endless hours of the lovely glow of it all through the day and night until bedtime and push myself to make the effort.

As I unpack the ornaments, one by one, I unpack my memories. The history of some elude me, but mostly they all have a past that is precious - ones the kids made in school, others from family, friends, colleagues - or ones that I bought myself, like Emily. Several years ago I happened to spot "Emily" in a Target bin and fell in love with her old-fashioned goodness. She's Anne of Green Gables, Pippi Longstocking, Understood Betsy all rolled up in one! And now she smiles from my tree each year.

 The ornaments are not only bridges to friends but to places where we lived - one from a hardware store in Kansas, some from the Conran's somewhere here in Northern VA, others from New York City, Tangier Island, on and on. They are like a little hello across the years, a small road map.

Perhaps I love the process so much because it's purely mine, not something handed down from my childhood as we seldom had a Christmas tree - lots of presents, candles glowing in the windows, the smell of baking cookies, music, but trees weren't a big part.

I remember our first year in Newfoundland when we were boarding with a sea captain's family. Our bedroom was small but we hiked into the woods out back and brought back a tiny tree and set it on our trunk. One of the family's teenage sons commented, "My dears, that is a some naked tree!" And so it was, but it was the beginning of our own tradition.

And that, in a word, is the beauty.

through the arch

A former library colleague and I were discussing our retirement from the library and I asked her if she missed it. She looked at me with an almost sheepish grin and said, "Not really!" And I grinned back. Not really.

To me it's almost astonishing to utter those words! I waited so long to retire thinking I would be devastated not to see my" people" anymore. I had dozens and dozens of people whose lives I had followed for more than 20 years - through births, deaths, marriages, divorces, promotions, firings, joys, sorrows - the gamut of life. I loved them. I still do but now they are a memory population and they are doing just fine. I often take them down from the shelf and think about them, but now its almost like thinking about characters in a book. I cherish them still for all the enrichment they provided me through the years, but now that phase of our friendship is over. And its just fine.

As Tennyson said so many years before me, but surely he was thinking of me (:)) "All experience is an arch wherethrough gleams that untraveled world whose margin fades for ever and for ever when I move."

A toast to untraveled worlds!

passing days

It was dripping when I started my walk this afternoon, but as if the rain gods kept tightening the faucet as I went along, the rain lessened and finally my umbrella came down for good. When I came through the door after four miles, my cheeks felt rosy cold - the first feel of winter! The rest of me was all bundled away, but the cheeks are the yardstick! And why shouldn't they feel cool - it's December!

And December is another mystery! HOW could it be December? I'm really trying hard to relax against the flood of time, but I do truly find how it slips through my fingers like water. disconcerting. I just look around, and it's gone!

The final glory tonight was a Face Book entry that pointed out we will be starting another DECADE in a few weeks! Now, that really got my attention! This is truly wild horses pounding across the plains! 

Nevertheless instead of bracing my feet against the floorboards, I will try to welcome each new day and not be calculating their accumulative heft! Early New Year resolution!

And everyone knows how well those things work out.

Keckling and aging

Early in my formation of a book club at the library, a woman of forty some years came one time and then confided in a friend that she couldn't join that group because the women were too old!! I was rather stunned as the majority were around my age! But the more I thought of it - and certainly it was her choice - what a potential treasure trove she was kicking to the curb! I realized further, I have always loved hanging around elderly people - at whatever age I was - because the years they represented awed me. And what a lot there was to learn from them! Even it was just not to be as cranky as they turned out to be!!

As my years increase, I would give worlds to be able to sit by my parents/aunts/uncles/grandparents' sides and ask hundreds of questions. The lost history saddens me. I suppose every generation feels this way, but now I want to know context! Why did they cook, think, dress, work, talk the way they did. This all came sharply to me when I was discussing with my husband why I always make "keckling" (cooked soy beans) for Thanksgiving. Mother did. Why? Soy beans don't seem like a Lancaster County staple! So did Grandma Weaver make them? Or was there some foreign influence that came to bear on Mother?! Such a minor detail, but I have such an ocean of longing to know more about the nitty-gritty of our bones.

And the mysterious keckling rocked the meal, as always!

It was a dark and scary night

My bosom childhood friend wrote me on my November birthday, reminiscing about fall days during school days. One Halloween my brother and I decided to have a party for our small circle of neighborhood friends. We went all out with spiderwebs gracing the cellar door entry to the basement (in those days they might have been real!), pumpkins carved and lit with sputtering candles and ghostly figures and goblins lurking in the shadows. Halloween was such a shivery departure from every other dark night - the possibility of lurking figures in costumes everywhere was so deliciously scary.

 And then there was the flinging of shelled corn on peoples' front porches. The frightening staccato noise probably scared us more than the comfortable people inside the lighted rooms! My mother drew the line at soaping windows on houses or cars, and reluctantly granted the corn as it could be swept away easily and eaten by God's creatures!

Why do we like to be scared, within certain boundaries and circumstances. I can still feel my heart pounding on those dark nights. We must have known instinctively there was a lovely circle of safety surrounding us.

Ah, how life has changed.

upon this rock

In another conversation with a group of women at lunch the other day, a friend said, :"I was always envious of big families who seemed to like each other. We hated each other."

I was stunned - both by her meaning and her honesty.

And I wanted to wrap each of my siblings close. We are all different, certainly. Our lives have taken many paths. We don't get together as a group that frequently. But it takes my breath away to think of the bond we have being broken. I take for granted the large, lovely, enveloping blanket of our love for each other and can't imagine life without it.

Those of us who were given strong foundations to build our lives upon should never for a second take our eyes off that priceless gift.

 And equally should be filled with admiration for those who did their own building from scratch.